Kim OHara wrote:... The one that's catching everyone's attention is extreme weather - how a small shift in average temperature translates into a big increase in heatwaves, droughts, rainstorm intensity, wildfires, etc. Hansen saw this back in 2012 https://thinkprogress.org/james-hansen- ... 86296c140/ and predicted that it would get worse, and it has ... and it will continue to do so.
Sea level change may be inexorable but it's slow in comparison and far more predictable.

Kim

E.g.

A Texas-size flood threatens the Gulf Coast, and we’re so not ready

Update: After a period of rapid intensification overnight, the National Hurricane Center upgraded Harvey to hurricane status at noon central time on Thursday. The storm is now expected to reach the coastline near Corpus Christi, Texas, late Friday as a major hurricane — the first U.S. landfall of a Category 3 or stronger hurricane since 2005.

In what could become the first major natural disaster of the Trump presidency, meteorologists are sounding the alarm for potentially historic rainfall over the next several days in parts of Texas and Louisiana. This is the kind of storm you drop everything to pay attention to.

Beyond environment: falling back in love with Mother Earth
Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh explains why mindfulness and a spiritual revolution rather than economics is needed to protect nature and limit climate change

In an interview at his home and retreat centre in Plum Village, near Bordeaux, Thay outlines how a spiritual revolution is needed if we are going to confront the multitude of environmental challenges.

While many experts point to the enormous complexity and difficulty in addressing issues ranging from the destruction of ecosystems to the loss of millions of species, Thay sees a Gordian Knot that needs slicing through with a single strike of a sharp blade.

Move beyond concept of the "environment"

He believes we need to move beyond talking about the environment, as this leads people to experience themselves and Earth as two separate entities and to see the planet in terms only of what it can do for them.

Change is possible only if there is a recognition that people and planet are ultimately one and the same.

"You carry Mother Earth within you," says Thay. "She is not outside of you. Mother Earth is not just your environment. ...

BJORN LOMBORG
How alarmist rhetoric warps climate policy
Climate change is not the biggest challenge in our future.
Climate change is not the biggest challenge in our future.
BJORN LOMBORG
T
Promoting his climate change film An Inconvenient Sequel, former US vice-president Al Gore likes to say that the nightly news has become “a nature hike through the Book of Revelations”.

He’s not the only one touting an apocalypse. In a much-shared story, New York magazine warned that famine, economic collapse and “a sun that cooks us” will happen as soon as the end of this century, as “parts of the Earth will likely become uninhabitable, and other parts horrifically inhospitable”.

Even astrophysicist Stephen Hawking recently declared that US withdrawal from the Paris climate treaty “could push the Earth over the brink, to become like Venus, with a temperature of 250 degrees (Celsius), and raining sulfuric acid”.

This is silly. Even the worst case scenarios from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change show 5C-6C temperature increases, about 50 times less than Hawking fears.

The cost of weather damage is rising, but it’s because we’re richer. Since 1990, global weather damage adjusted for gross domestic product has declined. And because we’re richer and can afford better infrastructure, fewer people are dying. In the 1930s, droughts, floods, storms, wildfires and extreme temperatures globally killed almost 500,000 people every year. Today they kill fewer than 25,000 people. Despite the population trebling, we have seen a 95 per cent reduction in climate deaths.

The IPCC estimates that, by the 2070s, climate change may cost the world somewhere between 0.2 per cent to 2 per cent of GDP. That’s a problem, but by no means the end of the world. The IPCC finds that for most economic sectors, “the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers” such as changes in population, age, income, technology, relative prices, lifestyle, regulation and governance.

Just pause and reflect on that. The UN organisation tasked with preparing for the risks of global warming warns that demographic changes and most other challenges are going to have a much bigger impact than climate change.

Global warming is an issue and one that we need to tackle, but the unglamorous truth is that it is by no means the biggest factor in our future wellbeing.

The reason for the over-the-top rhetoric is that climate policies are much more expensive than almost anyone is willing to go along with.

The Paris Agreement, supported by Gore and others, states that we should try to limit temperature increases to 1.5C. The evidence shows us this would require stopping all fossil fuel use in just four years. Humanity, which meets about 81 per cent of its energy needs with fossil fuels, would come to a standstill. People would starve: half the world’s population relies on food produced with nitrogen fertiliser, almost entirely processed with fossil fuels.

This extreme scenario is not going to happen. Study after study shows that most people are somewhat concerned about climate but only moderately interested in paying for a solution. In the US, the average annual willingness to pay is $US180 ($228) a household or $US70 a person. In China, it is $US30 a person a year. These are likely exaggerations, since people give a much bigger number when the question is hypothetical. Compared with the figure people say they would be willing to spend to offset CO2 emissions from flights each year, real-life travellers spend much less than 1 per cent.

The Paris Agreement will cost each American $US500 a year, each European $US600 and each Chinese person $US170. Despite rhetoric about keeping temperatures below 1.5C, these promises together will achieve almost nothing. By the UN’s own estimate, the Paris Agreement will reduce emissions by less than 1 per cent of what would be needed to keep temperature rises under 2C (a less ambitious target than 1.5C) yet will cost $US1 trillion to $2 trillion a year by 2030, mostly in reduced GDP growth. The treaty will deliver far less than most people expect, yet will cost much more than most people are willing to pay.

Achieving significant cuts would be much more expensive. For the EU to fulfil its promise of cutting emissions by 80 per cent in 2050 (the most ambitious climate policy in the world), the average of the best peer-reviewed models show that the cost would run to at least $US3 trillion a year, and more likely double that — meaning $US6000 for each EU citizen a year.

This helps explain why campaigners resort to painting ever-more catastrophic scenarios. Alarming predictions push us to devote more attention to climate policies — and, in the process, to spend more tax dollars on solar subsidies instead of healthcare, pension reform, libraries or education. People in the rich world — especially the poor, unemployed and elderly — are left paying for climate policies that will do little to fix the problem while leaving fewer resources for other issues.

The world’s poor are given an even worse deal. They are most vulnerable to climate change, but they are also the most vulnerable to a long list of health and development challenges that often go overlooked. Focusing just on climate means international concern and development spending is directed towards this rather than more pedestrian concerns such as tuberculosis, one of the leading causes of death in the world, where we could save 1.4 million lives every year for just $US8 billion. One-quarter of development now goes to “climate aid” — things such as ineffective off-grid solar panels. This is incredibly ineffective and not what the world’s poorest want: a UN global poll of nearly 10 million people finds climate to be the lowest policy priority, far behind education, food security and health.

Fostering a sense of panic doesn’t just distract us from other issues; it also means we don’t tackle climate change well. Economic studies show the right way forward is not subsidising inefficient solar panels, the mainstay of today’s climate spending, but to increase investment in green energy research and development to push down the cost below fossil fuels.

Over-the-top, alarmist rhetoric has a real cost. It encourages us to engage in phenomenally expensive and unhelpful climate policies while ignoring the smaller, cheaper and more realistic ways to respond to this and the challenges that will be much more pressing.

Bjorn Lomborg is director of the Copenhagen Consensus Centre and a visiting professor at the Copenhagen Business School.

According to their own internal research, which has since been leaked to the public, oil companies knew decades ago that fossil fuels cause global warming. On the other hand, I am not able to take global warming activists seriously when they refuse to acknowledge the impact of the animal livestock industry on greenhouse gas emissions.

Kim OHara wrote:
(1) Is Al Gore "most"?
(2) I'm sure he has spoken about it anyway, although he may not have given it the emphasis it deserves.

Kim

Al Gore, like other prominent climate change advocates, avoids promoting veganism or vegetarianism, or even a reduction of meat consumption, because of how it might not sit well with the general public:

Simply put, animal agriculture is one of the main culprits behind climate change. An Inconvenient Truth failed to address this, and people have been wondering whether the sequel would make up for it, particularly since it again stars Al Gore, who himself went vegan after realizing the connection between animal agriculture and global warming. Unfortunately, as James Cromwell and I were about to find out, the sequel likewise failed. And that's truly disappointing.https://www.ecowatch.com/al-gore-methan ... 33730.html

The documentary Cowspiracy, despite its possible flaws, features some revealing interviews with leaders of environmental groups who avoid making statements regarding the animal livestock industry:https://www.netflix.com/title/80033772

Last edited by Santi253 on Fri Sep 01, 2017 6:28 am, edited 1 time in total.

as regards Gore, although the EcoWatch article begins with the assumption that going meatless is the best thing we can do, which must make it far easier for them to "discover" that "fact". (I do agree that it's a very good thing to do for the planet, just not that it's necessarily the best thing.)

But you still haven't demonstrated that "global warming activists ... refuse to acknowledge the impact of the animal livestock industry on greenhouse gas emissions." In fact, your last post is evidence against that view.

Kim OHara wrote:
But you still haven't demonstrated that "global warming activists ... refuse to acknowledge the impact of the animal livestock industry on greenhouse gas emissions." In fact, your last post is evidence against that view.

I definitely recommend watching Cowspiracy, in which leaders of prominent environmental groups like the Sierra Club are exposed in interviews as being ignorant or evasive about the livestock industry's impact on the environment, including the climate. It also shows how much these organizations rely upon the meat industry for donations.

Climate change makes storms like Hurricane Harvey even more devastating. So why are only 19 percent of Americans talking about it?

There are times when the English language fails us. Witnessing the stunning force and relentless rain of Hurricane Harvey, you’re left with the feeling we just don’t have the words for what’s been happening in Texas. Not ones big enough to capture it all, anyway.

It doesn’t help when even the National Weather Service throws its collective hands up in the air in 139 characters of disbelief:

This looks to be Houston’s third 500-year rainfall or flood in three years. The most rainfall from a tropical storm to hit the lower 48, with nearly 52 inches in at least one location. Unprecedented alright.

Then there’s the human tragedy playing out with at least 30 dead as of the time of writing, some 30,000 in shelters, cities like Port Arthur underwater, and hundreds of thousands forced to evacuate. And there’s the sneaking feeling we still don’t know the full extent of the devastation – and won’t until the floodwaters recede. As Texas Governor Greg Abbott said, “We need to recognize it will be a new normal, a new and different normal for the entire region.”

Right now, of course, the national focus is on getting people to safety and taking care of those forced from their homes (and if you’re able, we’d ask you to do what you can to help). But once the immediate danger passes, we need to start talking about why this storm was so devastating and what we can do to limit our risk of another Harvey in the future. Because one part of that why is something we do have words for: the climate crisis.

Definitively answering the question of one-to-one causation between the crisis and a storm like Harvey is complicated. But in some ways, it’s also the wrong question to ask. Michael Mann has a great primer on the connections here, but the short version is that a world where temperatures keep rising and oceans have more and more heat energy is a world where storms like Harvey become more likely and hit harder than they would otherwise.

---
The Great Galveston Hurricane was a Category 4 storm, with winds of up to 145 mph (233 km/h), which made landfall on September 8, 1900, in Galveston, Texas, in the United States, leaving about 6,000 to 12,000 dead. It remains to the present day the deadliest natural disaster in US history.

The hurricane appears to have started as an atmospheric trough from West Africa, causing unsettled weather in the Caribbean, and emerging into the Florida Straits as a tropical storm on September 5. Owing to contradictory forecasts, the

---
The Great Galveston Hurricane was a Category 4 storm, with winds of up to 145 mph (233 km/h), which made landfall on September 8, 1900, in Galveston, Texas, in the United States, leaving about 6,000 to 12,000 dead. It remains to the present day the deadliest natural disaster in US history.

The hurricane appears to have started as an atmospheric trough from West Africa, causing unsettled weather in the Caribbean, and emerging into the Florida Straits as a tropical storm on September 5. Owing to contradictory forecasts, the

I expect they really do mean "unprecedented". They are, after all, professionals.
Be wary of comparing hurricanes a hundred years ago with recent ones, especially on the basis of lives lost.
As someone who lives in a cyclone-prone area (as, IIRC, you do) I am profoundly grateful to the far better forecasting of the satellite era. At the same time, changes in how and where people live have changed the flooding and property destruction that equal storms would cause, even in exactly the same locations. How many people lived in Galveston in 1900 vs in Houston now? How were the houses constructed? Dams and levees? Etc, etc.